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Luck

kennedy’s assassination walking along bloor st. two women wept quietly. a postman kept shaking his head. a school crossing guard stood stunned in the middle of traffic. a baker stood at the back door of his cake shop trying to light a cigarette. a gasoline jockey punched a coke machine. two cops sat in their parked squad car. the driver took off his sunglasses and rubbed his…

The Saints of Jazz - Kay Star

from my book The Saints of Jazz …Kay Star Kay Starr (July 21, 1922) Lou Gehrig could see the future. Luckiest man in the world. Knew when his time was up. Not Eugen Weidmann. Lost his head. Outside the prison of Saint-Pierre. The last public guillotining. Believe it or Not. Made Eugene so famous. Last thing he did was dance. The tramps passed. Little Kay Starr’s doorstep. And talked of…

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Draft Dodger

Don was an old friend from collage. Like many long hairs he had moved out to British Columbia to chill out. He got a job as a social worker, basically taking care of folks who were overdosing, robbing banks or pursuing careers as poets. He was driving me up the coast. I was hoping to find the poet Susan Musgrave. The coast of B.C. Is very hilly and I suffer from motion sickness. About an hour…

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#JoanBaez or #SusanMusgrave

I had arrived in B.C. To see an old girl friend and a friend from university and to get news about other colleagues who had fled Ontario for B.C. Or where hippies went to die. Vancouver Island was like the elephant graveyard in the Tarzan movies. I did learn that one of students from university hung himself from a Red Wood. My ex-girlfriend informed me that she was thinking of getting married.…

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an atmosphere of unease.

I just returned from the grocery store. People are livid with #Trump. They feel like he’s attacking their families, their kids, their grand kids. And he has created an atmosphere of unease. Nine Holes 45.1178° N, 72.4764° W An apple, banana and an orange. Still life. Beautiful. One week later… Two weeks later… A month… Nipigon 49.0125° N, 88.2633° W Meeting the lady of Christ’s Like…

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I was seated in the dining car across from a girl from Australia. I decided to stick to soup. The soup moved around the bowl. It was hard to catch. The girl, Louise, had a dish with chicken, potatoes, carrots, with a sauce over her entre. She told me that she was allergic to ants. A special kind of ant that lived on the beaches outside Sydney. If bitten she had to rush to a hospital. And then she…

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Booth River, Burnt Coat, Cayuga

I went on a trans continental train trip. Toronto to Vancouver. I had my own room. And for hours upon hours all you heard and felt was clippity clock, clippity clock, clippity clock. The country is huge. The Great Lakes are like seas more than lakes. We ate all our meals in the dining car and unlike hospitals, the food was pretty good. And we recycled. You never sat with the same folks twice. And…

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Church Street Is Burning

My uncle used to play a guitar. He made it himself and would perform at various church and school functions. He was boo’d off the stage. When I started to commit myself to writing poetry I went to many poetry readings. There were many courageous souls who opened up their scars, hearts, souls. No one boo’d. They were too polite. It was painful to watch. I never read. I never read until I had a…

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Joey the stool pigeon

The Hall Monitors was the first and only collaboration between Ed Kuris and myself. His dream like surreal pictures of fish and my collages seemed like an odd combination but they worked. The stories were short and episodic. “I think they’re going to can me,” Joey said. “I just did the most incredibly stupid thing.” Joey had befriended many students. They thought he was one of them. Or he…

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Hall Monitors

now available from Amazon Elvira the mad Christian She taught French. Each class began with a prayer. And each student was forced to face the wall and confess a sin. She believed the final reckoning was coming. And she was beautiful. It didn’t seem fair. In the hallway outside the Theology Department offices, she set up a shrine of flowers. For the children murdered by abortions. Ms. O’Neil,…

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murder

https://draft2digital.com/book/1396718/metadata About Murder I published murder in 1978. It was up for several awards but won none. I epublished it in the 90s and it won an EPPIE for poetry. Few of the original publication exists so I’ve decided to release it here again in pieces. Actually I need to retype it since I can’d find my original copy. What I’ve noticed about this work is the lost…

Mary Claire, Her Body

The whole pandemic seems like it happened years ago or something we studied in school. It will have an affect on our children. When polio hit I was a kid and there were kids who wore braces. I read somewhere that Joni Mitchell and Neil Young both caught it. I don’t know if that’s true but I’m sure some folks lives were changed. Poetry Super Highway Mary Claire, Lizard woman Her Body November…

My Struggle

When I was in the hospital, for months I think, I found myself getting increasingly antsy. It was like being in jail. For a while Mieke was sick and couldn’t visit me. Natasha and Katie were living quite far away and I told them not visit me, I was doing fine. Michael visited me every chance he got. I got quite emotional and cried the first time he said he loved me. I should have said that to my…

I'm 74 years old...

Its odd to think about it now, but as my open heart surgery stretched into 7 and a half hours, I had no sense of that at all in my inner sanctum. I had a different sense of time or times since my consciousness was the spider caught up in my dreams/hallucinations and the thought occurred to me that this might be an argument for the theory that all reality is part of a simulated reality. I’m 74…

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I'm an old man with regrets

During my open heart operation, a machine was operating as my heart, a machine was operating as my lungs, and my rib cage was opened like the gate into Dracula’s castle. And while all t his was going on I was living in a dream of being back stage of the Oscars surrounded by a lot of men, women, and children, all of whom were Japanese. And I had no doubts that this was reality. I’m an Old Man…

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